For months, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas has been working on plans to alter property tax deadlines in her office. She moved this year’s May tax sale to protect homeowners with back taxes due, and weeks ago began coordinating with President Toni Preckwinkle to waive interest fees that pile up on late payers.

“I submit that means relief for our people,” she wrote to Preckwinkle on April 29 of the waiver push. “Too many are jobless. They fear becoming homeless. We must act.”

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The Cook County Board at its May 21 meeting is expected to vote on the plan to waive two months of interest penalties that would start accumulating after Cook County’s Aug. 3 property tax deadline. About a dozen other counties have approved measures aimed at some form of property tax relief due to COVID-19 layoffs and shutdowns.

If approved, the altered waiver schedule could delay the disbursement of money to taxing bodies — schools, cities, libraries, park districts. Those are the entities funded by local property tax revenue; in hard hit regions of Chicago, including the south suburbs, taxing bodies for decades have been forced to jack up their tax rates due to declining property values, delinquent properties and the flight of businesses and homeowners to more tax-friendly states. It’s a vicious cycle perpetuated by inaction on the part of state elected officials to address skyrocketing pension costs that squeeze local governments.

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Still, the county board should approve the Pappas-Preckwinkle proposal to waive late fees. It would give property owners throughout Cook County time to catch up. To take a breath. “The problem with the (Aug. 3) due date is that people don’t have the money,” Pappas said. That pretty much says it all.

Restaurant owners, apartment landlords, mom-and-pop businesses that have been closed, and homeowners out of a job deserve a break. Property tax bills in Cook County can be unforgiving, both for the homeowner in struggling Ford Heights and in the Gold Coast. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, for example, paid more than $156,000 for the first installment of property taxes this year on his Astor Street estate, not including the mansion he bought next door, according to county property tax records. He’ll owe about the same this summer for the second installment on the main house.

The neighboring Pritzker property is the one that got him in trouble with the Cook County inspector general for allegedly removing toilets in 2015 during a rehab project to lower the home’s assessment. Pritzker ended up repaying the county about $330,00 in 2018, just before his election as governor, for the value of the breaks he received. On that property, he paid a first installment tax bill of more than $82,000 earlier this year, records show.

Of course there are bigger, broader and more complicated property tax dilemmas facing Illinois than toilet removal schemes — though that one was a doozy and, at one point, caught the eye of federal investigators, according to WBEZ.

The state’s high property tax burden due to thousands of layers of local governments, expensive labor contracts and uncontrolled pension costs continue to drive residents and businesses to lower-cost states. For the sixth straight year, Illinois’ population dropped last year while every bordering state’s population grew.

The state legislature could have put an amendment on the fall ballot to ease pension costs. Lawmakers could lower workers’ compensation costs for businesses. They could reduce state mandates that hike up the costs of doing business. They could do more to enable local governments including school districts to combine. They could cut state government costs instead of allowing the state budget to balloon each year. They could quit their addiction to borrowing.

But instead of tackling efficiencies, the latest property tax task force established by Pritzker last summer recommended — wait for it — higher sales taxes. Even Pritzker threw cold water on that idea while Republicans complained of being left out of the discussion. “For a state that is so in need of property tax reform, the Democrats have instead proposed tax increases,” House GOP Leader Jim Durkin said in January of the task force’s recommendations. “Heaven help the middle class.”

Lawmakers did move to consolidate downstate pubic safety pension funds, which is designed to improve investment returns. We’ll see.

But nibbling around the edges won’t solve the property tax problems of Illinois. Treasurer Pappas over the years has included more information on Cook County property tax bills and on her website to illuminate the cash crunch. Last year, she began listing the raw numbers of active employees paying into a particular pension fund, and the number of retirees depending on that pension fund, for each Cook County taxing body including Chicago’s.

For 169 governmental bodies, the numbers were lopsided. In some cases thousands more retirees were drawing from a fund than active workers were paying into it. One example: Even at the small Arlington Heights Park District, 432 retirees were pulling from that district’s pension fund with only 103 active employees paying into it.

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It’s unsustainable. It’s further proof of the urgent need for elected officials to make unpopular decisions to right-size pension benefits.

Have our elected officials done it? Not in Springfield, leaving it to county officials to do what they can. In this case, the Cook County Board will be presented with waiving interest fees on late tax payments. It’s worth doing. But it won’t come close to solving Illinois’ long-standing, suffocating property tax burdens.